Windfall

Chapter Three

Eamon had exquisite table manners. For some reason, that fascinated me. The neat, precise movements of his hands, the elegance in the tiny adjustments of his knife and fork. Elbows off the table at all times. He didn’t talk with his mouth full. In fact, he didn’t say much at all, just listened politely as Sarah rambled on. And on. And on.

“I just can’t believe that happened in broad daylight!” my sister said for about the twentieth time. I took a bite of French toast, made sure it was liberally dosed with maple syrup, and savored the sugar rush. “Don’t those people you work for have any security? It’s awful!… There should be security lights in that parking lot!”

“Well, I don’t believe it would have helped, Sarah. It was broad daylight,” Eamon pointed out reasonably. Bless him, he sounded more amused than irritated. “Do you have much trouble with such things around here? Criminal trespass, assault… ?”

“Couple of car break-ins,” I said, and washed down the sugar with coffee. Which accounted for two of the major food groups. “Nothing serious. Kids, probably.”

“And am I to think he was just another hooligan?” He ate a neat mouthful of eggs and arched his eyebrows at me.

“Not him,” I admitted.

“Sarah said you were being followed,” he continued after a polite pause to chew and swallow. “The same kind of van.”

“The same van,” Sarah insisted, and turned her big eyes to me. “Was it the guy? The one from the mall?”

No point in lying about it. “Yes. But—it’s all right, really. I’ll handle it.”

“Are you certain that’s the right thing to do? You might want to go to the police,” Eamon asked. He sounded neutral about it. Around us, other diners clinked silverware on plates and went about their daily lives, which probably didn’t involve getting stalked by out-of-state cops. I shook my head. “Ah, I see. Any particular reason why not… ?”

“I know him, sort of,” I said. “I’ll handle it.”

Eamon gave me a long, considering look, then put down his fork and dug his wallet from his back pocket. I’ve always thought you could tell a lot about a man from the state of his wallet; Eamon’s was slick, black, and expensive. He pulled a business card from it and handed it over.

“Cell phone,” he said, and tapped the corner of the thick paper. Sarah was right, the cards weren’t lightweights—creamy paper, raised type, a match in price range for the wallet that held them. “Look, I know you hardly know me, and I’m sure ladies like you have no shortage of men waiting to squire you around, but best to be safe.”

I nodded. He put the wallet away.

“I don’t care if you know him, Joanne. It’s the ones you do know that hurt you.”

I looked up from the card into his eyes. Large, gentle eyes that somehow mitigated the harsher angles of his face.

“No offense,” I said, “and I don’t want you to think I’m not grateful for the rescue this morning, but are you sure you really want to get into this? The two of us together could be a whole lot of trouble. You’re just an innocent bystander. And if we hardly know you, well, you hardly know us. What if we’re—”

“Villains?” Eamon sounded vastly amused by that. “Oh, love, I hardly think so. Keep the card, though. I’ve no duties just now, waiting for a deal to come through; there’s no reason I can’t help if you need it. Even if it’s just the occasional walk to and from your car, which, by the by, is quite the looker. Your car, I mean. What model is she?”

Firmer territory. We talked autos. Eamon had a startling breadth of knowledge about British race cars, and had a taste for Formula One, and ten minutes later I noticed that Sarah was looking more than a little put out by the whole conversation. Oh yeah. He was Sarah’s date, not mine. I suppose having animated, extended chatters probably was the wrong side of friendly.

I mopped my lips and excused myself to the ladies’ room, and took my time with the hand-washing and the application of vanilla cream lotion and refreshment of lipstick. My hair wasn’t too badly damaged from the wrestling match with Detective Rodriguez. In fact, I looked pretty good, for a change.

I felt a tug of longing so strong I had to grab the counter with both hands. I wanted David. I wanted to call him out of the bottle and have him sit across from me and smile and talk, as if there were something approaching a normal life for us, somewhere.

I found my hand slipping down to press flat over my stomach. There was still that unsettling flutter, deep down. The promise of life. I didn’t know how to feel about that… hopeful? Terrified? Angry, that he’d committed me to a responsibility so huge it made my Warden job look easy?

I wanted to have a normal life with the one I loved. Ones. What was vibrating so gently under my fingertips was the possibility, however small, of… family.

But I knew normal life was a fantasy, and not just because of the oddness of loving a Djinn. This morning, I’d felt him getting weaker before he’d gone back in the bottle. He hadn’t been out that long.

He wasn’t getting better, as I’d convinced myself he was.

David was dying.

The despair of that just went on and on, when I let myself look at it straight on. There’s a way to fix this. There’s got to be a way. I just have to… find it.

“Jonathan,” I said. “If you can hear me, please. I’m asking you. For David’s sake. Help me.”

No answer. Not that Jonathan was particularly omniscient, of course. I didn’t flatter myself to think that he had me on constant observation; hell, I probably didn’t even rate a speed dial. Time passed differently, to Djinn. He’d probably forget all about me until I was eighty and pushing my walker around the retirement home.

That was an oddly cheering thought, actually.

I took a deep breath, practiced a smile in the mirror, and went back out into the restaurant. As I weaved around tables and kicking children and a man who just happened to have his hand at butt level, waiting for me to squeeze by, I saw that Eamon and Sarah were deep in conversation. I slowed down to study the body language, and liked what I saw; he was leaning forward across the table, taking in every word, eyes fixed on her face. She was animated and vivid and luminous in the morning light.

The silent language of attraction.

As I watched, she dropped her hand down on the table, leaning forward into him, and his long, elegant fingers moved to cover hers. Just a brush, but enough that I saw the tremor go through her.

I almost hated to interrupt. Almost. But then, that was a younger sister’s place, to screw up the good times.

I slid back into my chair and they immediately sat back, aside from giving each other little secret smiles. “So,” I said to Eamon. “What are your plans for the day?”

“Actually, I’m at loose ends.” He was still watching Sarah, eyes half-closed. “I was thinking of taking in the sights. I’m not well acquainted with Fort Lauderdale. What can you recommend?”

He was including me, but not really; I got the clue memo. I politely bowed out.

“Wow, that would be great, but I’ve got a thing today. To do. So why don’t you and Sarah go have some fun? It looks like it’s going to be—” Without even thinking about it, I felt for the weather.

And fumbled the effort.

I froze, blank, coffee cup half to my lips, and concentrated harder. I felt horribly clumsy. The delicate sensitivity I’d always had to the balance of things, the breathing of the world, it felt… muffled. Indistinct.

“Jo?” Sarah asked, and looked over her shoulder, toward the wall I was staring a hole in.

I blinked, forced a smile. “—it’s going to be beautiful,” I finished. “Warm and sunny. Or so says Marvelous Marvin, anyway. So you might want to take in the beach. I think Sarah picked up a killer swimsuit yesterday, right, Sarah?”

My sister turned a rapt smile back to Eamon, who was watching me with a little frown grooved between his eyebrows. I sent him a silent I’m okay, and Sarah distracted him with a question about England, and they went back to living in a two-person world.

I closed my eyes for a second, concentrated, and drifted up toward the aetheric.

Moving between dimensions was something so automatic that it was like breathing for me; I lived half my life there, connected to the world, seeing its layers and levels.

It felt like swimming through syrup, today. And once I was there, the colors looked dim and indistinct, the patterns muddy and confusing. There was something happening to me, but I couldn’t think what; I didn’t feel bad. I just felt… disconnected.

“Jo?”

Sarah was saying something, and from her tone of voice, she’d been saying it more than once. I opened my eyes and looked at her, saw her impatient frown.

Eamon was measuring me again.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“Fine,” I said. “Sure. A bit of a headache, I guess. Listen, I’m really—I’m just really tired. I think I’m going to go home and lie down for a while before I have to do—the thing I have to do. Why don’t you guys go have fun?”

They didn’t seem too unhappy about that, although Eamon insisted on paying for breakfast and taking me back to the studio for my car, and tailing me home, and even went so far as to escort me upstairs and do a quick tour of the apartment.

(I wished I’d cleaned up better.) When he was satisfied that I wasn’t going to be jumped on by a crazed stalker hiding in the overstuffed closet, he and Sarah took off. I waved at them from the patio balcony, and stood outside for a few minutes, watching as his car made its way out onto the street again, heading for a glorious day of sun and fun.

A white van turned a corner, glided into the lot, and parked. I could see a shadow in the driver’s seat.

“Hope you’re comfy,” I said grimly, and looked up at the sky. It was clearing.

The humidity was down, and the cool ocean breeze whispered over my skin and rustled palm trees down at ground level.

There was absolutely nothing I could think of to do that would make a damn bit of difference, except wait and pretend to be completely comfortable with Detective Rodriguez’s continuing campaign of intimidation.

I went back inside the apartment, changed into a turquoise blue bikini, grabbed a towel and a folding chaise lounge, and made myself a pitcher of margaritas. My arm still throbbed, but it didn’t look as if it was badly damaged. I had shadowy bruises forming on my wrists to match the far-sweeter marks of David’s lovemaking from earlier in the morning.

Party on the patio, Detective. Intimidate this.

I slid on my sunglasses, oiled up, and saluted him with a drink as I soaked in the morning rays.

What’s the cardinal rule of sunbathing? Oh, yeah. Don’t fall asleep.

Well, I did. I was lying on my stomach, sun massaging all the tension out of me, and I was thinking about David and hot-bronze eyes and golden skin, and getting that pleasant liquid ache that made me want to call his name, and somewhere around there I slipped into dreamland. It was a nice place. I stayed.

When I woke up, I knew immediately that I was as burned as if I’d stuck myself under the oven broiler. My back felt puffy and numb, and I’d sweated so much I’d soaked through the bikini and the towel. I sat bolt upright, grabbed the rest of my warm margarita and bolted it down, and hastily decamped from the patio into the apartment.

The white van was still downstairs, sitting innocently in a legal parking space.

No sign of Rodriguez. I couldn’t tell if there was still a shadow in the driver’s seat or not, but right at the moment, I had another problem.

I dumped the chair, oil, pitcher and towel, and hurried into the bathroom. My front looked fine. I bit my lip and began to turn, very slowly. Tan… tan .

. . redder… red… scarlet…

Oh man. I peeled down the back of my bikini bottoms and found the contrast to be just a little bit more than a barber pole’s stripes. This was really going to hurt.

I stripped off the bikini and got in the shower; that was a mistake. The numbness wore off fast, replaced by a nice selection of agony and pain, depending on where I directed the spray; I gingerly patted myself dry and slathered as much of myself with burn cream as I could reach. And suffered.

When the phone rang, I was in a high temper, ready to bite a telemarketer’s head right off. “What?” I barked, and clutched the towel looser around my aching back.

“Damn, girlfriend, I knew you’d be in a bitchy mood after the Sunny costume,” Cherise giggled on the other end of the line. “But you looked so cute and cheerful!”

“Oh, please, Cherise. At my age, cute? Not really what I’m going for.” I tried sitting down. My thighs and back lodged a violent protest. I paced instead, went to the patio doors and pulled the curtains shut, then dropped the towel on the pile of Things I Had To Pick Up Later and continued pacing around naked. “That was Marvin’s little joke, right? Because I one-upped him yesterday?”

“Sorta,” she agreed. I could practically see her checking her fingernail polish.

“Hey, there’s been somebody asking questions about you down at the station. Tall guy, Hispanic, real polite? Sound familiar?”

Except for the polite part, it matched the description of Mr. White Van downstairs. “What does he want to know?”

“How long you’ve been here, where you were before, past history, how long we’ve known you, shit like that. Hey, are you in trouble? And is it, you know, serious?” She didn’t sound worried. She sounded breathless with excitement.

“No, and no.”

“Is he your stalker-guy? Because usually they don’t interrogate your close personal friends. They’re more of the scary watching-from-a-distance kind of weirdos. Oooh, is he from the FBI?”

“No. Cher—”

“Did you see the UFO over the ocean last night?”

“Did I—what?”

“The UFO.” She sounded triumphant. “I’ll bet they’re tracking down everybody who saw it. There was a thing on the ’net about it; the IT guys told me over breakfast. Don’t open the door if guys in black suits and buzz cuts show up.”

“Cherise.”

“Call me if Mulder drops by. Oh, speaking of that, look, could you do me a favor? I, ah, lost Cute British Guy’s phone number…”

“You never had his phone number.”

“Yeah, but your sister had it and she was going to give it to me only—”

“I’m not giving you Eamon’s phone number.”

“Oh, so now it’s Eamon,” she said. “Fine. Be that way. Break my heart, since you won’t share Hot Boy David either.”

“Bye, Cherise.”

“See you at three?” We had some promo commercial thing. I checked the clock.

Still four hours to go. “I’ll pick you up.”

“Yeah. See you then.”

I hung up and kept walking. The air-conditioning kicked on and felt like ice on my back, which was good. Maybe I could find something light to wear—gauze would be just barely acceptable. Anything heavier would be torture.

The phone rang again before I could put it down. It was Cherise again. “I forgot to tell you: Marvin said you were supposed to wear the Sunny costume for the promo. Don’t worry, I stuck it in the car. I’ll bring it.” She hung up fast.

Before I could scream.

“Wow,” Cherise said, when she saw me in the halter top and shorts and flip-flops. “You’ve really mastered this business casual thing.”

I threw her a dirty look and tried to ease myself gently into the passenger side of her convertible. Gasped when my burned back touched the leather. Cherise exclaimed and grabbed me by the shoulder to inspect the damage.

“Oh, man, that’s bad,” she said, and clucked her tongue, just like my grandmother. “You can’t wear the Sunny suit like that. I mean, jeez, you’ll die. Foam rubber on a burn?”

Like I had a choice. I sent her a miserable look.

“You’re so gonna owe me, girlfriend.” She slammed the convertible into reverse, peeled out, and shifted like a Grand Prix champion on her way out of the parking lot. The white van flashed by in a blur. I saw tail lights flare as it started up. “I may have to blow Marvin to get you out of this, you know. Hell, we may both have to blow Marvin. Oh, don’t worry, we’ll figure it out. He can’t ask you to put on the damn suit like this; it’s got to be against some government OSHA rule or cruel-and-unusual punishment or something.”

I groaned. “Yeah, that Marvin, he’s all about the work rules.”

She knew I had a point, and frowned at the traffic as she merged onto the street. A Lincoln Continental seemed to have personally offended her, from the scowl she threw the driver. “So maybe you had an accident. I could drop you off somewhere. Like the hospital. You could even have a bill to back it up.”

“Much though I’d like to pay a thousand dollars to have some teenage barely-out-of-medical-school intern diagnose a sunburn…”

She was already moving on from the idea. She looked at me with the utmost gravity, the kind of look you’d get from a close personal friend if they’d decided to donate a life-saving organ to you. “I’ll wear the Sunny costume. You be Beach Girl today.”

Which was quite a sacrifice. Cherise was always Beach Girl; that was her thing. Tiny bikinis and a perfect smile. Except for being too short, she was a Sports Illustrated swimsuit model. And she never did costumes. I think it might have been against her religion. She’d have to say ten Donna Karans and one Tommy Hilfiger to make up for it later.

Tempting as it was, I honestly couldn’t see Marvin going for it, not when he had such a golden opportunity to make my life miserable. “He’ll never agree,” I said morosely. “And besides, Burned Beach Girl? What kind of message does that send? This is supposed to be a spot talking about the dangers of the sun, remember?”

“Oh, come on, they’ll only shoot your front, anyway. And hey, baby, if your back isn’t a cautionary tale, I don’t know what is…”

I gave her a wan smile and held back my hair as I turned to look over my shoulder. I wasn’t all that shocked to see the white van turning out of the parking lot in pursuit—well, not really pursuit. He wasn’t in any big hurry to catch me.

“Something wrong?” Cherise asked, and checked the rearview. “Oh, shit, you’ve got to be kidding me. Is that the same guy from the mall?”

“Yeah.” I turned back to face front, slid on sunglasses, and leaned my head against the seat. “Don’t worry about him. He’s just—”

“Obsessed?” Cherise put in, when I didn’t. “Yeah. I totally get that. You know, I’ve got at least three fanboys who send me letters every week wanting me to—well, you don’t really need to know that. Anyway, it comes with the territory. We come into people’s lives, and they want to keep us.”

Cherise merged onto the freeway, blew her horn at a trucker who made a kissy face, and whipped around traffic with a speed and ease that would have impressed a NASCAR crew chief. Her Mustang—which I coveted, badly—was a new model, gorgeously maintained, and Cherise had never been one to keep her light under a bushel, so to speak. She was dolled up in a denim miniskirt that rode three-quarters up her tanned, toned thighs, a tight, midriff-baring little top, and a Victoria’s Secret bra that gave the top a little lifting and smooshing action. Her hair streamed out like a silk flag in the wind. She was one of those women who would arrive at her destination, after thirty minutes of sixty-mile-per-hour hair abuse, and look salon-fresh with a pass of her brush and a quick, careless flick of her head.

I used to have that. I missed that. My hair was curling again. Not that it would matter under the Sunny Suit.

“So,” she said. “Tell me all about him.”

“Stalker guy?”

“No, idiot. David.” Cherise weaved in and out of steady traffic, keeping us in the shade of big trucks. She waved at a cop car as she passed it. The cop winked and waved back. “How’d you meet him?”

“Taking a cross-country trip,” I said. Which was true. “He was on his way west. I gave him a ride.”

She let out a high-pitched squeal. “Oh my God, was he hitching? ’Cause all the guys I see hitching are three weeks out of safe-hygiene zone, not to mention all skanky-haired and not cute.”

“I gave him a ride,” I continued, with wounded dignity, “and he helped me out with some trouble. We just sort of—clicked.”

“I’ll bet it wasn’t so much a click as a bump… never mind. So where’s he from? What does he do? I mean, I’m assuming he’s not a homeless guy wandering the streets…”

“No, he’s—” Man, how had I gotten into this conversation? “He’s a musician.”

That was nearly always safe. No visible means of support, odd hours, weird habits. Ergo, musician. “He plays gigs here and there. So he’s in and out. He’s not always around.”

“Bummer. Then again, it’s tough to get tired of them when they’re not hanging around farting on the couch and complaining about the Lifetime channel. Is he hot in bed? I’ll bet he’s hot.”

“Cher—”

“Yeah, I know, I know. But still. Hot. Right? C’mon, Jo, throw me a fantasy bone, here. You know half the fun of having a hottie boyfriend is bragging.”

I smiled. “I’m not complaining.”

“And look, I die. Thank you very much.” Cherise suddenly eased off the gas. I opened my eyes and looked at the road; traffic was slowing up ahead. “Oh, dammit. Wouldn’t you know? Two miles to go, and what the hell is this… ?”

Traffic was stopped heading up onto the overpass. As in, stopped, all lanes screeching rubber. Cherise came to a halt, put the car in park, and eased herself up in the seat to try to catch a look. People were bailing from their cars to point.

I popped the door and got out to stand and gawk like everybody else.

There was a guy standing on the railing of the bridge, clearly about to go over to his death and splash on the concrete below. Okay, that was clearly bad.

But it really was way, way worse than anyone else could possibly know. I realized almost instantly that nobody else there was seeing what I was seeing.

There were Djinn fighting over him.

There were two of them, facing off against each other. One of them was instantly recognizable to me—little pinafore-wearing, blond-haired, straight-out-of-the-storybooks Alice, who’d done me a few favors back in Oklahoma. She looked sweet and innocent, except for the nuclear fire in her blue eyes. Regardless of appearances—which in Djinn were notoriously unreliable—she was right up there in the don’t-mess-with-me rankings. I liked her, and so far as I know she didn’t dislike me, but that didn’t make her a friend, exactly. You don’t make friends with the top predator when you’re below her on the food chain. You just enjoy not being on the menu.

Alice was standing between the stopped cars and the side of the bridge, staring up. The poor bastard on the railing—who in my view was looking less like a suicidal maniac than a pawn in a high-stakes card game—was teetering on the narrow rail itself and, to most eyes, he probably looked as if he was precariously balanced in midair; in actuality, his arm was being held in a viselike grip by another Djinn who was standing up there with him.

I recognized her, too—I’d nicknamed her Prada, once upon a time, because she had a pretty sharp fashion sense, but she was looking a little the worse for wear right now. The fine designer jacket was torn, the crisp white shirt stained, and whatever jewelry she’d been affecting was long gone. The look was, well, feral would be one word for it. She was glaring at Alice, who by contrast looked unruffled and altogether too clean to have been in a grudge match, although that was obviously what was going on.

I’d arrived just in time for Act III of an ongoing drama. And possibly a tragedy.

Even if the cops arrived, they weren’t going to be able to handle this.

“Um… stay here,” I said to Cherise, and moved around the stopped cars, heading for Alice.

“Hey! What are you doing?” She bailed out on the driver’s side. “Do you know that guy?”

“Just stay here!” I barked, and I guess the ring of command must have come through; Cherise stopped where she was, watching me as I moved carefully toward the railing.

Something she said made me think. The guy up there did look vaguely familiar, but no, I wasn’t sure I knew him. But there was something…

He fixed on me. Like recognizing like. He stopped flailing with his free right hand for balance and held it out to me. Palm exposed.

And I saw the swift, silver glitter of a glyph.

He was a Warden.

Prada, balanced on the railing with the ease of a hawk on a high wire, shook him violently for moving without permission. His feet scrabbled for purchase on the slick metal and he yelped, face gone pale and blank with strain.

Alice suddenly flicked that nuclear-hot stare in my direction, and there was nothing childlike in those eyes.

“You shouldn’t be here,” she said to me.

“Tell me about it,” I said. “I’m not thrilled about it either.”

“This is what you bring as reinforcements?” That was Prada, indulging in a sneer while Alice’s attention was elsewhere. I wouldn’t have, if I’d been her, but then, I wouldn’t have been stupid enough to get into the fight in the first place. Alice was definitely not a power you wanted to mess with. “This human?”

Prada had killed me once. Well, temporarily. And to be fair, she’d been under orders to do it, since she was enslaved to a master—speaking of which, no sign of her hit man Warden boss. Which made me both happy and nervous.

Alice didn’t so much as look at Prada, just shifted her weight slightly in the other Djinn’s direction, and I felt the aetheric swirling in new, scary ways.

Oh, this was way ugly, and bound to get worse. Wardens having at it with their powers was bad for humanity at large; Djinn had the potential to be far, far worse.

Why were they fighting? And more importantly, what were they fighting over?

And wait… reinforcements? That sounded bad. That sounded like Prada might have help coming. Did Free Djinn fight in public like this? I’d never heard of it happening before.

Especially not with a Warden as the chew-toy between two attack dogs. That, I would have heard of.

“I didn’t call for help,” Alice said, in that sweet little-girl voice. “I don’t need any. One last chance. Let him go.”

Prada gave her a mocking little laugh and jerked the Warden off balance again.

All she had to do was open her hand. It was a good long ways down to an ugly, bone-crunching impact on the busy freeway below. Alice didn’t move; it was possible, given the power balance, that there was nothing she could do that wouldn’t kill the hostage caught in the middle.

“Alice, what’s going on?” I asked.

“Who’s Alice?” Cherise asked, craning her neck. She’d ventured over to stand next to me. “That guy’s named Alice? Hope it’s his last name.”

“Shut up and go back to the car!” I practically yelled it at her. She winced and danced backward, holding up her hands in surrender.

This was out of control, and it was very, very dangerous. Prada and Alice couldn’t unleash anything like a full-scale Djinn war here; there were way too many innocent people in range. They could bring down this whole bridge. There was no way I could protect against that.

“This isn’t your fight,” Alice said to me. Her attention was riveted on Prada, on the man Prada was holding. “Leave. You’ll draw their attention if you interfere.”

“Me? Wait… their attention? Who are you talking about? Alice, talk to me! What the hell’s happening?”

I could feel Cherise looking at me strangely, since I was apparently having a conversation with thin air. I couldn’t worry about that right now.

“Go!” Alice said sharply, and I felt a sudden push on the aetheric. She meant business. “I can’t protect you. Stay away from us.”

I was liking the sound of this less and less. “Not until I know what’s going on with you guys.”

She made a growling sound. It was really unsettling, because so far as I’d ever noticed, Alice in Wonderland hadn’t been big on growling like a rabid animal.

The growl broke off as if somebody had pulled the switch on it, and she swiveled away from me to survey the general area. “Too late,” she said. “They’re here.”

As I turned, I saw the other Djinn. Four of them, misting into visibility at strategic points in the crowd. She was outnumbered. Probably not outclassed, but still.

“You have to stop,” Alice said, turning back to Prada. “He’ll forgive you for what you’ve done, but you must stop now. No more.”

Prada sank her flawlessly polished talons deeper into the Warden’s left arm, and pulled him off balance again. He teetered desperately, struggling to stay alive.

I could hear his gasps even over the shouts of the onlookers, trying to talk him down. They, of course, were operating under the assumption that he was crazy, and could choose to do something on his own. Could save himself.

I knew better.

Around me, the four new Djinn were closing in. Slowly. They seemed to be either cautious about Alice’s abilities, or enjoying themselves. Maybe both.

This didn’t make any sense. Djinn didn’t bring their fights into the human world like this, not so publicly. And a Warden trapped in the middle, a tender morsel between tigers… no, this wasn’t good at all. Things were shifting. I could feel that, even if I didn’t know why it was happening.

Prada was aiming a cold, hard, inhuman smile at Alice.

“You should run, little one,” she purred. “I promise not to chase you.”

“I’m not running,” Alice said. “You started the fight. You should be prepared to carry it all the way.”

“I am.”

“Then leave the man out of it. He doesn’t matter.”

“Of course he matters!” Prada gave her a contemptuous look. The Warden’s feet slipped, and he flailed for balance, anchored by Prada’s ruthless grip. The crowd of spectators who’d gathered gasped. A trucker leaned out the door of his semi, open-mouthed.

I didn’t have a lot of time. I could hear the wail of sirens approaching; the cops would be here soon, and God only knew what that would mean.

Alice folded her hands together and watched. Wind ruffled her cornsilk-smooth hair, fluttered the sky blue dress and white pinafore. She was straight out of Lewis Carroll, but when I focused on the adult strength in that child’s face, I could see something older, stronger, and far scarier than anything out of the Looking Glass.

Prada had made her angry. That was probably a really, really stupid move.

“That guy’s gonna jump,” Cherise murmured softly from behind me. “Oh my God. Oh my God…”

The four other Djinn—had to be allies of Prada—were stalking closer. Alice suddenly made her move, lashing out with an explosive flare of power. It hit Prada, looped around her, and attempted to jerk her and her hostage off of the railing and onto the relative safety of the bridge, but it backfired. Prada, straining to counter it, nearly went over instead. Alice immediately dropped the attack when the Warden screamed in panic.

With all the power she had, she was helpless to do anything without endangering innocent lives. She needed help.

I had no idea whether Alice was on the right or wrong side in this, but at least she wasn’t the one holding a guy over a three-story drop.

I considered my options, and decided on something relatively risky. Djinn are, essentially, vapor in their atomic structure; they can increase their weight and give themselves the corresponding mass, but just now I figured that Prada was more interested in keeping her balance than having true human form. A human appearance was doing the job, for her purposes. She didn’t need the actual reality.

All I needed to do was hit her from behind with a powerful wind gust, enough to break her grip on the guy she was holding, and at the same time tip him backward and encourage him to hop down onto the concrete again.

Simple. Relatively elegant. And a hell of a lot better than waiting for the Djinn Deathmatch to turn up a winner.

I closed my eyes, took a fast, deep breath, and reached out for control of the air around me.

And missed.

I gasped and reached farther, stretched. Felt a faint stirring come to me. A stiff breeze. Nothing nearly strong enough. Oh my God… I felt clumsy, drugged, imprecise. Horribly impaired. I fought my way up onto the aetheric, feeling like I was swimming against a flood tide, and when I arrived everything was gray, dimmed, distant. Gray as ash.

It was like what had happened to me over breakfast with Sarah and Eamon, only far worse.

I buckled down and went deep, all the way deep, into reserves I hadn’t called on since I’d survived the Demon Mark. Pulled energy out of my cells to fire the furnace of power inside. Pulled every scrap of power I had and threw it into the mix…

And it wasn’t enough. I could bring the wind but I couldn’t control it. It would be worse than useless, it would hit with the force of a tornado and swirl uncontrollably, throw the man’s fragile human body onto the concrete and that would be my fault…

Prada sensed I was doing something. She snarled and extended her free hand toward me, talons outstretched and gleaming, and it was déjà vu all over again.

I could feel her reaching into my chest to take hold of my pounding heart. She wouldn’t even have to work hard to kill me; it would be a simple matter of disrupting the electrical impulses running through nerves, just a quick jolt …

“David!” I yelped. I didn’t mean to; I knew better, dammit, but I was scared and there was a Warden who was going to die because I wasn’t strong enough…

“David? Where?” Cherise, distracted from the drama for a second, stared at me.

“Who, the guy up on the rail? That’s not David, is—”

I felt the warm surge of power, flaring to a white-hot snap, and David came from out of nowhere between parked cars, olive drab coat belling around him in the wind. Auburn and gold and fire in flesh. Moving faster than human flesh could manage. Nobody standing around watching the action even glanced at him. To their eyes, he didn’t even exist.

The other four Djinn in the crowd froze, staring. And as one, took a step backward.

Prada hissed and instantly transferred her attack to him, which was a mistake; it brought him to a stop, all right, but only because he wanted to get a good, hard look at her. He looked tired, so horribly tired, but he dismissed whatever she was trying to do to him with a negligent shake of his head. He looked at the man on the railing, then the cops. Took it in, in a single comprehensive glance.

I wondered, not for the first time, what Djinn saw when they studied a scene like that. The surface? The glowing furious tangle of human emotions? The energies we exerted, even unconsciously, on the world around us?

Whatever it was, it couldn’t have been pretty. I saw faint lines groove themselves around his mouth and eyes.

His eyes turned to hot, molten metal, and his skin took on a hard shine. Getting ready for battle. He looked at Prada, who returned the glance with level calm.

“Why are you doing this?” he asked.

“I don’t answer to you,” she replied. “You betrayed us. Turned your back on us.”

David turned to Alice, who raised pale eyebrows. “It’s begun,” she said. “It’s spreading like a disease. A Free Djinn kills a master, sets loose a slave, who frees another, who frees another.”

He looked appalled. “Jonathan ordered this?”

“Of course not.” Alice’s cornflower blue eyes fixed on Prada again, unblinking.

“Ashan killed her master for her, in return for her loyalty.”

Prada echoed, sarcastically, “My master.” It was a curse, loaded with acid and venom. “He didn’t deserve to lick my shoes. I broke no laws. I never touched him.”

“What about him?” David said, and nodded at the Warden she was jerking around on the railing. “What has he done to you to deserve this?”

Prada’s elegant lips compressed into a hard line. “They all deserve this.”

“Oh, that’s where we differ,” he said. “They don’t. Let him go. If you do, I swear that I’ll protect you if Alice makes a move against you.”

“David,” Alice said, and there was a warning in it. “I’m here on Jonathan’s orders.” He ignored it.

“I’ll protect you,” he repeated. “Let him go.”

Prada bared perfectly white, shark-sharp teeth. She looked, if possible, even more feverish. “You’re Jonathan’s creature,” she said. “You always have been. He and his creatures don’t command me, not anymore.”

David looked—well, shocked. As if she’d just told him the Earth was a pancake carried on the back of a turtle. “What do you mean?”

“I follow the one who knows that humans are our enemies,” Prada said. “The one who understands that our enslavement must end, regardless of the cost. I follow Ashan.”

Oh, shit.

I was looking at a civil war. Playing out right here, messily, in the human world—Djinn Lord Jonathan and his second lieutenant (now that David was incapacitated) Ashan had had some kind of falling out. The Djinn were splitting into sides. Ashan hated humans—I knew, I’d met him, back when I’d been a Djinn.

Jonathan didn’t hate humans, but he didn’t love us, either. We were just an annoyance and, at best, he wouldn’t actively exterminate us. Allowing us to die was another thing entirely.

David was the only Djinn I’d ever met who seemed to really care one way or another about the fate of humanity as a whole, and David was nowhere near powerful enough to be in the middle of this. Not these days. If the other Djinn were wary of him, it was only because they knew him from the old days.

They couldn’t yet see the damage that had been done to him.

He didn’t look impaired, though, not at the moment. The wind ruffled his bronze-struck hair, and the light in his eyes was like an open flame. More Djinn than I’d seen him in a long time. Less human.

He turned slightly and shifted his gaze to me, and I felt that connection between us pull as tight as a belaying rope. I was his support, his rock. And he was in free fall now, burning through his fragile resources at a terrifying pace.

I have to try to stop this, I felt him say across that silent, secret link. Hold on. This may hurt.

He wasn’t kidding. Suddenly the drain between us—the one-way flow cascading from me into him—opened up to become a torrent, and damn, it didn’t just hurt, it felt as if my guts were being ripped out and scrubbed with steel wool. I must have looked like hell, because Cherise called my name and I felt her grab me by the shoulders. I couldn’t pull my eyes away from what was happening in the Bermuda triangle of the three Djinn standing in front of me, and the four moving into position to attack David from behind.

Whatever was about to happen, it was going to happen now.

David started walking forward. Prada’s eyes—burning ruby red now—followed him, but she didn’t move. Still caught in her iron-hard grip, the Warden watched tensely, too. Helpless to affect any outcome. He wasn’t a Weather Warden, I could sense that much, and I doubted he was an Earth power. Probably Fire, which wouldn’t do him a damn bit of good right now.

Poor bastard. He’d spent his life thinking that he was a pinnacle of power in the world, and he was getting a hard lesson about where he really stood in the great scheme of things.

David reached the railing. Prada didn’t make a move. David considered the metal for a second, then hopped up with a fluid, catlike movement, and began walking the thin, slick curve. He was smooth and careless about it, as if it were solid ground. No hesitation. No human awkwardness. It was as if gravity was just another rule to break for him. Even the gusts of wind didn’t have any effect except to whip the tail of his coat out to the side as he covered the rest of the distance toward Prada and the Warden.

It was the single most inhuman thing I’d ever seen him do.

David was still two or three steps away when Prada let out a high-pitched shriek like ripping metal, and let go of her hostage. David lunged forward, but he was too late. The man windmilled for a fraction of a second, and then his head and shoulders leaned back, and his battered cross-trainers slipped off the slick metal of the railing.

And then he was gone. Heading for a fast, ugly death.

“David! Do something!” I screamed. Everybody else was screaming, too, but David heard me; he turned his head, and even at this distance I saw the hot orange flare of his eyes. As alien as the perfect balance he demonstrated up there on the railing. I saw the doubt in his face, but he didn’t argue, and he didn’t hesitate. Without a sound, he spread his arms and jumped off the overpass.

Graceful as a plummeting angel.

At the same moment, Alice moved forward in a blur, launched herself up and out, and took Prada in a flying tackle out into space. The other four Djinn launched after her like a pack of wolves. They were a snarling, snapping, furious bundle of power, and I heard Prada howl in fury and pain a second before they all disappeared with a snap so loud it was like a thunderclap. Gone.

I lunged forward, gasping, and if there were people in my way I didn’t care.

They moved, or I moved them. I banged hard into the railing, hot metal digging into my stomach, both hands reaching down as if I could somehow grab hold, do something.

Anything.

“David!” I screamed.

I didn’t see anyone down below. The cops had arrived on the street below, a sea of flashing lights and upturned faces. No sign of David. No sign of the Warden.

Movement in the deep shadows of the overpass drew my frantic eyes. They were hanging in midair. David had hold of the man. The two of them were suspended, turning slowly and eerily in the wind. A silent ballet.

Nobody else could see them, I realized. Just me.

I felt sick and cold and terribly, terribly weak, and realized that the flow of energy from me to David had gotten bigger. Wider. Deeper. As if we’d broken open some dam between us, and there was no stopping the torrent until the reservoir was dry.

“Oh God,” I whispered. I could literally feel my life running out.

He looked up, and I was struck by the white pallor of his face, the bitter darkness of his eyes. “I can’t,” he said. I could hear him, even across the distance, as if he were speaking right next to me. “Jo, I’m killing you.”

“Put him down first.”

He tried. I felt him start to move but then he lost control, and it was free fall. He managed to brake, but it wasn’t going to hold, and then he was going to plummet. I had about three seconds to act.

I wasn’t a magician, able to suspend the laws of gravity at will. I had power, yes, but it was best used on the massive scale if I had to move fast, turning forces that measured in the millions of volts. Power that could destroy, but rarely heal. To grab the Warden required pinpoint control of very treacherous forces, precisely balanced winds from at least three quarters, and an exact command of how much force was being exerted on fragile human flesh at any given instant.

David was a bright spark, fading. Between us was a black bridge, a fast-flowing river of energy going out of me, into him. Being devoured.

I stretched my arms and reached out until I felt I might unravel and break and be swept away. I tasted blood and felt my body starving for air and dying inside as its energy poured out onto the wind, screaming. I tried to do what I’d done a thousand times before, and alter the temperature of the air at the subatomic level, creating friction and lift and heat and wind.

For the first time… I failed.

I felt David break first with a bright, hot, shattering pop, and the black drag on my power fell away. The rebound slammed into me with stunning force, knocking me backward, and then I lunged for the railing again and saw David let go of the Warden.

Who fell, screaming, to his death.

There was nothing I could do. Nothing.

I screamed and covered my eyes from the sickening sight of his body crushing on pavement, his blood splattering in an arc as his skull shattered.

I felt his life snap like his bones.

David froze in midair, fixed in place, eyes dark and strange, body transforming from the fire of the Djinn to the black coal shadows of the Ifrit.

“Oh God…” It wasn’t stopping. I felt every bit of energy being sucked out of me; the life, the heat, the baby oh God not the baby you can’t David…

I felt everything around just… suspend. In some odd way, I kept on… outside of time, of life, of breath. It felt like being a Djinn, or at least what I remembered of it. Except I could feel some core of me screaming and coming apart under the strain. I wasn’t healed.

Time had stopped. Pain hadn’t.

Someone had intervened.

I heard the scrape of shoes on the asphalt behind me.

I turned and looked, gasping for breath, and saw Jonathan walking toward me through a flash-frozen world. People were locked in midstep, midword, midgasp.

He and I were the only things moving.

Unlike most Djinn, Jonathan—the most powerful of them all—looked human.

Middle-aged, with graying short hair. A runner’s build, all angles and strength.

Black eyes, and a face that could be friendly or impassive or cruel, depending on the mood and the light. Just another guy.

And yet, he was so far from human he made David look like the boy next door.

“You have to help me,” I began. I should have known that the sound of my voice would piss him off.

He walked right up to me, grabbed me by the throat, and shoved me against the rail so hard that my back bent painfully over open air.

“You’re lucky,” he said in a whiskey-rough growl, “that I’m in a good mood.”

And then he looked over my shoulder at the frozen, twisted shape of David, stopped in midtransformation. The shocking ruin of the Warden’s body on the pavement below. Jonathan’s face lost all semblance of humanity, all expression.

There was a sense, even more than before, of some vast and terrible power stirring around him.

Even the wind was utterly silent, as if afraid to draw his attention.

“Jonathan—” I began hoarsely.

“Joanne,” he interrupted, and it was a low purr, full of darkness and menace, “you just don’t seem to listen. I told you to fix David. Doesn’t look fixed to me. In fact…” His hand tightened convulsively around my throat and rattled me for emphasis. I gagged for breath. “In fact, he looks one hell of a lot worse than the last time I saw him. Not surprising that I’m very disappointed.”

There was absolutely no mistaking the fury in him, even though it was cloaked behind a good-looking face and eyes that had all of the charm and warmth of black holes.

“I don’t have time for this crap,” he said, and turned those eyes back to meet mine. And oh, God, the rage simmered, red flashing points in black. Ready to break free. Ready to rip apart me, this bridge, the city, the world. He was that powerful. I could feel it rising off of him like heat from a lava flow. “I let you have your stupid little games and your stupid little romance, and it’s destroying him. I don’t have time for this. I need him back. Right now. This isn’t some goddamn game I’m playing, do you understand that?”

Because he was in the middle of a war. I did understand. The battling Djinn had disappeared, but the aftereffects of their battle lingered like burned cordite on the raw air. If this was happening all over the world…

“I don’t know how to help him,” I croaked. “I’ve tried. I just don’t understand how to do it.”

I felt his grip on my throat tighten again. He pressed right against me, his thighs against mine, bent over me in a parody of a dance.

“Well, then, you’re no good to me, are you?”

“Wait…” I tried to swallow. Pretty much useless. This was going to hurt so, so badly, if I survived it. “You—you must be able to—”

“If I could fix him, don’t you think I already would have? Do you think this is some kind of game for me, watching him suffer?” No, I didn’t think that. I could see the furious pain in Jonathan’s eyes. “He’s your slave. I can’t touch him until you set him free.”

David. The bottle. Jonathan couldn’t interfere. Those were the rules. I could only imagine how much he hated that, hated me for being in his way.

I tried to swallow, but his grip was too tight. I could barely choke out the words around the burning pain in my throat. “I can’t. You know as well as I do that if I let him go now—”

He knew. David would be beyond anyone’s control once I released him from the bottle. Jonathan might be able to help him, but first he’d have to catch him, and that might not be possible.

“Help me help him,” I whispered.

Oh, he didn’t like that idea, not at all. I’d never scored high on the list of Jonathan’s favorite people, for a lot of reasons—first, I was human, which was not a selling point; second, my relationship with David, and David’s tenacious commitment to me, had upset the long-standing order of Jonathan’s universe. And as Jonathan was, in Djinn terms, well-nigh as powerful as a god, that wasn’t really a good thing.

It was also very hard to mistake the fact that Jonathan cared for David. A lot.

In deep and eternal ways that stretched back to the days of their making. It didn’t make for a comfortable three-sided relationship.

“Help you?” he repeated. “Oh, I think I’ve helped you just about as much as you deserve, sweetheart. As in, you’re still breathing.”

“Not very well,” I croaked, and flailed a helpless hand toward my aching throat.

Which made his lips twitch in something that wasn’t quite a smile. He let go of me, but he didn’t step back. I slowly braced my hands on the railing and pushed myself back upright, careful to make no sudden movements—not that I could in any way hurt him, of course—and we ended up pressed together, chest to chest. He didn’t care about my personal space.

He stared at me from that very intimate distance. Seen close, those eyes were terrifying indeed… black, shot through with sparks like stars, galaxies burning and dying and being born. Once upon a time, far in the past, he’d been human and a Warden, with the three powers of Earth, Fire, and Weather… like those Lewis possessed these days. I didn’t know much about his human life, only his death; it had caused the Earth herself to wake and grieve. Jonathan had been made a Djinn by the force of that mourning. David, who’d been dragged along with him through those fires of creation, had come out sublimely powerful. Jonathan had come out a whole order of magnitude greater than that, perilously close to godhood.

He was losing that, to Ashan. How in the hell Ashan had the big brass ones to decide he could win in a toe-to-toe dogfight with Jonathan was beyond me, but the fact was, even if Jonathan kicked the crap out of him and all his Djinn followers, it was a war to make the Earth tremble. Nobody would be safe.

Nothing would be sacred.

Jonathan looked into me. It hurt, and I flinched and trembled and wanted desperately to hide in some dark corner, but there was no hiding from this. No defending against it, either. His hands came up and rested on my shoulders, slid up to cup my face between them with burning warmth. The heat of his skin on mine confused me, made me feel odd and disembodied. I wanted to pull away but I had nowhere to go, and besides, I wasn’t sure my body would even listen to any such command.

“Feeling weak?” he asked me, and bent closer. His eyes swallowed the world. “Feeling sick? A little off these days?”

My lips parted. He was very, very close. So close that if he’d been human, we’d have been engaged.

He turned my head to a slight angle, tilted his own, and put his lips next to my ear. “He’s killing you,” Jonathan whispered. “Can’t you feel it? It’s been going on for a while, a little at a time. He’s eating you from the inside. You don’t think that’s been killing him, too? Destroying him?”

I remembered all of the signs. The weakness. The clumsiness I felt when reaching for power. The gray indistinctness of the aetheric. The overwhelming drag when I tried to call the wind.

“Human power can’t sustain him anymore. He’ll suck you dry. He’s an Ifrit; never mind how he looks when he’s gorged himself on your energy. He can’t help it. He’ll kill you, and once he does that, even if I can get him back, he’ll be a wreck. He’ll recover, but it’ll take too fucking long.”

I felt tears burn hot in my eyes, break free, slide cold down my cheeks. He moved back just an inch, and turned my head again in those large, strong hands to look at me again. His thumbs smoothed the wetness from my skin.

“I don’t care about you,” he continued with soft intensity. “Make no mistake; I’ll rip you apart if I have to, if it comes down to a choice of you or him. But I can’t let him kill you. He’ll be useless to me.”

I flinched. He held me in place. “I don’t know how to fix this,” I said. “I swear, Jonathan. I don’t know!”

“Simple. Go home, get that fucking bottle, smash it, and survive the rest of your pathetic life like everybody else in the human world. You have to let him go. He’s already dead to you.”

“Liar,” I whispered.

And got an evil, beautiful smile in return. “Yeah? If I’m a liar, why can’t you save him now? Why couldn’t you save that sad bastard down there from falling to his death? All in a day’s work for a Warden like you, right? You don’t need me. Go on. Be a hero.”

He let go of me and stepped back, and it was like going from the baking heat of the desert to Antarctica. My body cried out for his warmth, as if he were a drug and I’d developed a lightning-fast addiction. Bastard. He’d done it deliberately.

David was a wonderful, lyric poet of a lover. Jonathan, if he’d ever stoop to anything so intimate with a human, would be a pirate, taking what he fancied and forcing his partner to want it too. All cruel, casual grace and absolute dominance.

I grabbed the rail on either side and sucked in deep, calming breaths. Jonathan folded his arms and watched me as the energy drained away. Spiraled out into the black hole of David’s need.

“Help me,” I said, and God, defeat tasted bitter as poison. “Show me how to stop this.”

“Say the magic word.”

“Please.”

“That’s not the one I was looking for, but I’ll take it.” He reached out and put his hand flat against my chest. Heat spilled into me, intrusive as a stranger’s hands, and I went rigid against the invasion. Not that it mattered. Jonathan could do anything he wanted.

But it was life he was giving me, and I didn’t have the strength to refuse it anyway.

Jonathan watched me surrender to him with those hidden, dark eyes, and gave me a tiny thin slice of a smile. It was almost human. Not kind, but human.

“All right. What I’ve done is create a reservoir of power inside of you. It won’t last long. You need to let him go or you’ll die.”

“If I do, how do you know you can stop him from coming after you?” Because David would be drawn to power, sure as a Demon.

“I can take care of myself,” he said offhandedly. “We’re done. Might want to hold on to something.”

He let his hand fall back to his side.

Behind me, power exploded. The flash burned through me like a shock wave, and wind came in its wake, raging and furious at being held back; it nearly knocked me over, and Jonathan reached out to steady me as my hair blew straight toward him, long and tattered as a battle flag. Through the waving curtain of my blowing hair, I saw Jonathan give me another very small, cynical smile.

And then he looked past me and I saw pain in his expression. He said something, but it wasn’t in human language; it was the bright and singing tongue of Djinn.

A prayer, a curse, a lament…

I sensed a black presence behind me in the air.

David was transforming into something terrible, something with cutting edges and hunger for a heart.

When I tried to turn around to see, Jonathan held me in place and shook his head. “Don’t look.”

It was bad enough seeing the devastation in his eyes. I was watching the end of a friendship that wasn’t supposed to have an ending… something time itself was supposed to respect. I did this. No, we did this, David and I, together.

Love, I was starting to realize, was beautiful, but it was also ruthlessly selfish.

I touched Jonathan and felt fire, not flesh; it burned me with wild and intimate fury, but I didn’t let go. “Jonathan…”

“I have to go,” he said, and I heard that edge of grief in his voice again, liquid and molten with pain. “He’ll kill me if I stay here. Or worse. I’ll kill him. He’s too hungry right now. Remember what I said. You don’t have much time—just get it done.”

He let go of my arm and stepped back. My hair obscured my vision again, and I reached up to shove it out of the way as I whirled to see what he was looking at.

David was gone. In his place was a black, twisted shadow of a thing, angles and glittering edges and nothing remotely human to it. An Ifrit.

It touched down on the bridge’s surface and stalked toward us, fixed on power.

Fixed on Jonathan.

“No!” I screamed, and threw myself in David’s path, but he went through me as if I were smoke, lunged with diamond-bright claws outstretched…

And Jonathan vanished before they could touch him.

David misted out a few seconds later. Chasing after that bright, shining ghost.

I was alone.

Well, except for the onlookers who were suddenly coming to realize that something weird had happened. But not exactly what, or who was responsible.

The cops arrived. I was hustled off to stand beside a police cruiser. Nobody knew what to ask, because no one understood what had just happened; all I had to do was be just as clueless. Pretty easy, actually. I wasn’t faking the shock and trauma. The questions they tried to frame were just as vague as my answers, so in the end the cops just gave it up and accepted the whole thing as a suicide.

I wished I could see it that way, but I couldn’t stop crying. I couldn’t help but replay the terror in the Warden’s eyes as he’d reached out to me, or the scream that had ripped out of him when David let him go.

My fault.

I’d never even found out his name.

Eventually, the cops remanded me to the custody of Cherise, who had been standing at the barricades looking anxious and dumbstruck and more than a little freaked out for some time. She didn’t say a word. She grabbed my hand and towed me off toward the Mustang, this time pulled over to the breakdown lane, and got me well out of the way before turning on me.

“What the fuck was that?” she yelled over the resumed din of traffic, honking horns, and the wind. “Joanne! What in the hell did you think you were doing?”

I couldn’t answer. I didn’t have the strength. I just looked at her, walked around to the passenger side and got in the car. Cherise continued to berate me and pepper me with questions, which made no more sense than the ones the cops had managed to put together. I ignored her.

David was gone. I couldn’t feel him anymore. I shut my eyes and remembered that back in Las Vegas, when I’d held the bottle of another Djinn turned Ifrit, I hadn’t been able to sense any connection to her either… but she’d obeyed my commands. At least, the most important one.

Without opening my eyes, I whispered, “David. Get back in the bottle, now.”

I had no way of knowing if he had. Hopefully it would give Jonathan some space.

Maybe David would even recover a bit. Maybe, maybe, maybe… everything was so screwed up. I pressed the heels of my palms into my eyes until I saw stars.

The warmth in me felt foreign, like artificial life support. Jonathan had warned me it wouldn’t last. How long did I have to find an answer, one that wouldn’t destroy David in the process?

Cherise was saying something about us being so fired; we were the better part of an hour overdue for the shoot, of course, not that I cared. I just wanted to go home. I felt the thrum of the engine as she started up the Mustang, but then she slammed it back into park and reached over and grabbed me by the shoulder.

I looked at her. She was the picture of astonishment, from her raised shaped eyebrows to the shiny, lip-glossed O of her mouth.

“What?” I asked.

For answer, she shoved me forward and put her hand on my naked back.

“Hey!”

“Joanne,” she said, and slapped me lightly there, several times. “Your burn. It’s gone.”

A parting gift from Jonathan. For completely different reasons than her subsequent declaration of a miracle, I found that more unbelievable than anything else.

I wanted to go home. Cherise flatly refused to turn the car around, since we were so close to our destination. “If I’m going to get my ass fired, I want them to do it to my face,” she said grimly, and hit the gas to power us around the fast-moving traffic and down the off-ramp.

The shoot was being staged in a used-car lot. Of course. Some sort of promo tie-in with the local junker dealership. Cherise shrieked the Mustang to a sliding stop in a convenient space and eyed the salespeople mistrustfully as they appeared like—well, like magic.

“Nobody touches my car,” she said to the Alpha Marketer, a big ex-football-type guy with a flattop haircut and that I’ll-make-you-a-great-deal gleam in his eye. He grinned and gave her the thumbs-up. “And save it, gorgeous, I’m not in the market.” Maybe not for a car, but her eyes skimmed him up and down, giving him the Male Blue Book rating. It must have come out a ka-ching, because Cherise came out with one of her famous smiles. “Watch it for me?”

“Absolutely,” he said, and handed her his card. “Anything you need, you come straight to me.”

She slipped it in her back pocket with a wink, and hustled me up to the cluster of people near the main building. I went, barely aware of moving. I just wanted to collapse in a heap and cry.

Marvelous Marvin was not in a good mood. He was pacing, face flushed under the pancake, snapping off orders to some poor intern who looked anemic, asexual, and on the verge of giving notice—or possibly expiring of an asthmatic fit. Marvin still had his makeup napkin tucked into his collar. It was not a humorous sight.

The camera crew was lolling around, looking happy as clams. As well they should be, at fifty bucks an hour or more each. One was catching a light nap in a portable chair with a sunshade.

“You!” Marvin bit off as he caught sight of us. “You are fired, get me? Fired! Both of you!”

I mustered up some sense of responsibility. “It’s not Cherise’s fault,” I said dully. No, it was my fault. I kept replaying the Warden’s fall, his impact on the concrete. He’d been young. Too young to die like that, caught in the middle of something he couldn’t understand.

“I wasn’t talking to her, and anyway, I don’t give a shit whose fault it was, you’re both fired! Look, I can get pretty girls twelve to a dollar out there on a beach; I don’t need you two with your prima donna attitudes…”

“Hold up,” said the director, who was watching a portable TV in the shadow of a minivan with the channel logo painted on the side. “Come here, Jo.”

I came. Cherise came with.

The director—Rob—pointed at the screen as he took a bite of his cheese sandwich.

“Is that you?” He looked up at me as his finger touched a tiny, foreshortened figure on the screen.

“Yeah, that’s her,” Cherise jumped in when I stayed quiet. On the screen, the Djinn didn’t show up—just us humans. The Warden on the railing fought for his life, flailing against the air. “God, Rob, she tried to save that guy. She really did.”

He turned his attention back to the footage. I closed my eyes when I saw the Warden’s feet slip off the railing for the fatal plunge, but not before I saw myself lunge forward. Didn’t seem like I’d reacted all that quickly, but there it was, in grainy news footage. It looked as if I’d been trying to grab his hands or something.

“Jesus,” Rob said quietly. “Joanne, I’m sorry. This is terrible.” He thought about it for a few seconds, then raised his voice. “Yo! Doug! Change of plans! Let’s get back to the station right now. Get on the phone to—what channel is this?—Channel Four—and get whatever raw footage they have. Feature story. Get Joanne and Cherise on camera with—who’s up?—yeah, Flint, and do the standup with them on the bridge, if you can. If not, studio. We need to get this now.”

Marvin had followed us. He ripped the makeup napkin theatrically out of his collar. “What are you talking about?” he thundered.

Rob glanced up at him, then back down at the screen. “Sorry, Marvin. I’m scrubbing the promo.”

“You can’t do that!”

Rob tapped his baseball cap. It was dark blue, and it said in big, white, embroidered letters, NEWS DIRECTOR. “I believe I can, actually.”

Marvin turned and stalked away, tossing the balled-up napkin at his intern, who fumbled it and had to chase it under a freshly polished Toyota.

“You want me to get into the Sunny Suit for the interview?” I asked bitterly.

Rob looked up and met my eyes. His were gray, sharply intelligent, and utterly calculating.

“From now on, you don’t wear the Sunny Suit. Somebody else does,” he said. “Maybe Marvin.”

In spite of everything—even the crushing uncertainty and grief of not knowing where David was, what was happening to him, the guilt and shock and horror—that made me smile.

Cherise cocked an eyebrow. “What about me?” she asked. Rob gave her a more guarded look. “I’m not fired, right? So, are you going to need me today?”

“Just for the interview, Cherise. But you’ll get the full appearance fee for the promo.”

She nodded soberly, took a long look at me, and reached behind Rob and took his navy blue windbreaker off the back of his chair to drape it around my shoulders.

I was shivering. Delayed shock. Outright fear.

I needed to get home.

The interview took hours.

By the time I staggered in, it was late afternoon, and I was absolutely exhausted. No sign of Sarah, which was lucky; the last thing I wanted to do was put up with my sister’s cheery enthusiasm about her new beau right now.

I shed purse and shoes and stripped off clothes as soon as I’d slammed the bedroom door shut, threw on my warmest and most comfortable bathrobe, and curled up on my bed, pillow in my lap.

I opened the bedside drawer and took David’s bottle from its case. It gleamed blue and solid and cold to the touch, but it was just a bottle, no sense of him in it or around it. I didn’t know if he was in there. Didn’t know if he was suffering. Didn’t know if he even remembered who I was.

I took hold of it and thought about how easy it would be, really. A quick, hard swing at the wooden nightstand.

I’d promised Jonathan that I’d set David free, but if I did that, it was like giving up hope. Giving up everything. I didn’t think Jonathan could save him, and while I might not be able to either, at least David wouldn’t get any worse inside the bottle. If I did set him free, he might complete the transformation to Ifrit. He’d almost certainly start preying on the most powerful source around—and that meant Jonathan.

But most importantly, I might lose him for good this time.

Jonathan’s artificial life support was still going strong. I had time left.

I couldn’t do it. Not yet.

I curled up with his bottle held close and cried until I fell into an exhausted gray twilight sleep.

Dreaming.

The mountaintop was familiar. I’d been here before… a small, flat space of empty rock, surrounded by the sky. Far below, canyons cut deep into the earth.

Dry, for the moment, but I knew how fast they could fill and flood. Water was the most treacherous of the elements.

I was sitting cross-legged, warmed by the sun, wearing something white and sheer that barely qualified as fabric, much less cover… ceremonial more than functional.

There was no sound in my dream but the dull whispering rush of the wind. The breathing of the world.

I felt a warm hand touch my hair and fingers sink deep into the soft mass. Where they touched, curls straightened and fell into silk-smooth order.

“Don’t turn around,” David’s voice whispered in my ear. I shivered and felt him hot against my back, hard muscle and soft flesh. As real and honest and desirable as anything I’d ever known. “You have to be careful now, Jo. I can’t protect you—”

“Just stay with me,” I said. “You can do that, can’t you? Just stay.”

His hands moved down to my shoulders and bunched gauze-thin fabric, then slid it free to drift away from my skin. “If I do that, you’ll die.”

“I’ll find a way.”

His kiss burned hot on the side of my neck. “I know you’ll try. But you have to promise me that when the time comes, you’ll make the right choice. You’ll let go.”

I had a nightmarishly slow vision of David’s hands opening, of the Warden sliding loose and falling to his death. Only this time it was me falling, screaming, reaching out.

I was toppling over the edge of the mountain, toward the currents below.

David grabbed me around the waist and held on.

“Don’t let me hurt you,” he whispered, and his voice was shaking with strain, vulnerable with need. “Stop me. Please, Jo, you have to stop me, I can’t do it myself…”

I looked down to where his arms were around me, his hands touching me.

Black, twisted Ifrit hands. Angles and claws and hunger.

“Please,” he whispered against my skin, and he sounded so desperate, so lost.

“Please, Jo. Let me go.”

“I can’t,” I said numbly.

“Let me go or let me have what I need! I can’t—I can’t—” He exploded into a black, oily mist, howling, and was gone.

I collapsed forward, the white gauze drifting over me in the relentless, murmuring wind, and screamed out loud, until I woke up.

My sister was home. I could hear her moving around out there in the living room, humming something bright and happy. Probably something classical; Sarah always had been more cultured than I was, from the early days when she’d looked forward to piano lessons and I’d cut them to go chase baseballs out on the corner lot. I didn’t hear Eamon’s voice. I realized I was still holding David’s bottle in a death grip, in both hands, and put it back in the padded case in the nightstand.

You promised, a little voice whispered in the back of my mind.

I had. But I wasn’t ready.

I closed the nightstand drawer, shuffled into the bathroom, and winced at the glare of the bright, unflattering Hollywood lighting. I looked like crap… swollen eyes and bedhead. I struggled through combing the tangles out, got my hair more or less straight, and decided to leave the eyes as is, except for a quick application of Visine. I tossed on a crop top and tight low-rise jeans (artfully, though not intentionally, bleached in a random pattern, thanks to an accident with the Clorox Fairy) and walked out barefooted into the rest of my world.

Which was in surprisingly good order.

Sarah was cooking. She had fresh, bright vegetables laid out on the kitchen counter and was whaling away with a gleaming oversized knife. Behind her, a pan simmered with a pool of oil. She looked up at me and froze in midaria, then forced a smile and went on with her chopping.

“Hey,” I said, and sat at the kitchen table, staring at my hands.

“Hey, yourself.” She did something in my peripheral vision, and then a glass of wine appeared on the table in front of me. White wine, silvering the outside of the glass with chill. “Will that help?”

“Help what?” I sipped the wine. It was good, light and fruity with a kick at the end. Dry finish.

“Whatever the problem is.”

I sighed. “It’s more of a rotgut-whiskey-out-of-a-paper-bag problem than a fine pinot grigio problem.”

“Oh.” She retreated to her vegetables again. “You’ve been dead to the world all day, you know. Eamon’s coming over for dinner; I hope that’s all right. I was hoping your, ah, friend could join us. David. The musician.”

Oh, God, it hurt. I took another gulp of wine to dull the knife-sharp pain.

“He’s touring.”

“Oh. Too bad.” She shrugged and kept on with food prep. “Well, there’s plenty. I’m making chicken primavera. I hope you like it.”

As I had no opinion, I didn’t answer, just sipped wine and stared out the patio doors. The ocean rolled in from the horizon, and it was a beautiful twilight out there. We didn’t face the sunset, but the faint orange tinge was in the air and reflected off the sheer, glassy points of the waves. The sky had turned a rich, endless blue, edging toward black.

I’d been asleep a while, but it felt as if I hadn’t rested in days. Everything felt sharp and fragile and not quite right.

I let it fade into white noise as Sarah scraped meticulously dismembered vegetables from cutting board to bowl. She left the veggies and checked a stock pot on the stove, which sent out an aroma of chicken and herbs when she lifted the lid. I didn’t remember owning a stock pot. It looked new. Like the gleaming chef-quality knives. I couldn’t remember if I’d gotten my credit card back. That worried me, in a distant sort of otherworldly way.

She kept talking about my neighbors, whom I guess she’d spent the morning chatting up. I failed to follow, but it didn’t really matter; she was babbling with an edge of nervousness, the standard Sarah tactic when she was trying not to think about something else. I remembered her doing this in high school, getting ready for dates with Really Cute Boys. She was nervous about Eamon.

“… don’t you think?” she finished, and began draining the chicken. She saved the stock, I noticed. The better to boil the pasta.

“Absolutely,” I said. I had no idea what the question was, but she beamed happily at the answer.

“I thought so. Hey, give me a hand with this, would you?” She was struggling with the weight of the stock pot. I got up and grabbed one of the side handles, and a hot pad—those were new, too—and helped out. She flashed me a grin that faded when I didn’t grin back. We drained the chicken in silence. The stock pot, refurnished with broth, went back on the burner and got a new load of pasta.

Sarah dumped chicken and veggies into the oil-prepped pan to sauté.

“Is it David?” she asked as she expertly stirred and adjusted the heat. I blinked and looked at her. “Did you have a fight?”

“No.” There was no easy answer. She took it for the avoidance it was and concentrated on her cooking.

I’d turned off the phone before collapsing on the bed this afternoon; I wandered over to the wireless base and saw that there were messages. I picked up the cordless and punched buttons.

“Would you like to own your own home? Rates today are…” Erase.

“Hot singles are looking for you!” Erase.

A brief moment of silence, and then the recording said, “Be on your balcony in thirty seconds. I’ll be waiting.”

I knew the rich, ever-so-slightly inhuman female voice. And that wasn’t a recording. Not exactly.

I put the phone down, walked over to the plate-glass window and looked out. No one out there. But I knew better than to think I could avoid this, even if I wanted to; the Djinn Rahel wasn’t the kind of girl you could avoid for long. I opened the sliding glass door and stepped out into the cooling breeze. As I rumbled the door shut again, I felt… something. A little stirring inside, a slight chill on the back of my neck.

When I turned around, Rahel was seated at my wrought-iron café table, legs crossed, inspecting her taloned fingernails. They were bright gold. The pantsuit she was wearing matched, and under it she wore a purple shirt the color of old royalty. Her skin gleamed dark and sleek in the failing light, and as she turned her head to look at me I saw the hawk-bright flash of her golden eyes.

“Snow White,” she greeted me, and clicked her fingernails together lightly. They made a metallic chime. “Miss me?”

I sat down in the other delicate little café chair and folded my hands on the warm wrought iron table. “Like the bubonic plague.”

She folded a graceful, deadly hand over where her heart would be if she’d actually had one. “I’m devastated. My happiness is shattered.”

“To what do I owe this pleasure?”

“Ah, is it one?”

“Just say whatever you’ve come to say.” I said it in a flat tone, tired of the banter already and just wanting to crawl back in bed and avoid reality for another few hours. Avoid the choice I knew I had to make. Which wasn’t even really a choice.

Rahel leaned forward and rested her elbows on the wrought iron. Those alien, bird-bright eyes studied me without any trace of mercy or humor.

“You’re dying,” she said. “Broken inside. I see that Jonathan has given you time, but you’d best not waste it, sistah. Things are happening too quickly.”

“David’s an Ifrit,” I said suddenly. I remembered seeing it happen to Rahel—who, so far as I knew, was the first Djinn to ever recover from it. And she’d done it by sapping the power of the second-most-powerful Djinn in the world… David … and by a unique confluence of events that included human death and intervention by the Ma’at in an extraordinary cooperation of human and Djinn.

“I need the Ma’at,” I said. “I need them to fix David.”

Rahel was regarding me with those steady, predatory eyes. In the dying daylight, they looked surreally brilliant, powered by something other than reflected energy. She drummed her long, sharp fingernails on iron, and the chime woke a shiver up and down my spine.

“The Ma’at won’t come. The Free Djinn have affairs of their own to attend to, and even if we did come, we would not be enough. David is too powerful. He’d drain the life from all of us, and it would accomplish nothing.”

“Jonathan wants me to—”

She held up her hand. “I don’t care what Jonathan wants.”

This was new. And unsettling. Rahel had always been fanatically in the Jonathan camp; I understood there were cults of personality within the Djinn world, if not outright political parties, but I’d never thought of her as changeable in her allegiances. She was for Jonathan. Period.

She continued, “If you let David free now, he will hunt, and he will destroy. I was dangerous, when I was an Ifrit. He will be deadly, and if he goes after Jonathan, Jonathan will not act to stop him as he should. Do you understand?”

I did, I thought. I’d felt the voracious hunger in David, the need to survive. I knew he’d have died rather than even consider feeding on Jonathan, in saner days, but what was happening to him had no relation to sanity. Not as I understood it.

“If you keep him in the bottle, he’ll drain you dry,” Rahel whispered softly. “But it will end there. He will be trapped in the glass.”

“But he’s not draining me now!”

She merely looked at me for so long I felt a sick gravitational shift inside my stomach.

“He is?”

“Ifrits can feed on humans,” she said. “But only on Wardens. And there is something within you that is not human that attracts him as well.”

The baby. Oh, God, the baby.

“You want me to voluntarily let him kill me,” I said. “Me and the baby. To save Jonathan.”

“You must,” Rahel said. “You know what’s happening; you feel it already. Djinn are fighting. Killing. Dying. Madness is taking us, and there will be no safety without Jonathan. No sanity in anything, including the human world. Do you understand this?”

I shook my head. Not so much from ignorance as exhaustion. “You’re asking me to sacrifice my life and my child. Don’t you understand what that does to him if he’s left standing after that?”

“Yes. Even so, even if it destroys him forever, it must be so. There has not been a war among the Djinn for thousands of years, but this—it’s coming. We can’t stop it. Some want to pull away from humans, from the world. Some want to stay. Some feel it is our duty, however distasteful, to save humanity from itself.”

“Gee,” I said. “Don’t put yourselves out.”

She gave me a cool look. “There have been blows exchanged that cannot be taken back. I fear for us. And you. This is darkness, my friend. And I never thought I would see it again.”

“Jonathan knows that if I don’t break the bottle, there’s no bringing David back.”

Rahel didn’t answer, exactly. She etched sharp lines into the metal of the table, eyes hooded and unreadable. “He thinks he knows the outcome of things,” she said. “I think he sees what he wishes to see. He believes he can master David, even as an Ifrit. I don’t believe he can. But as much as he wishes to save David, he is thinking of your child, as well. He wishes to save all of you, if he can.”

“And you don’t. You want us to die for the sake of damage control. What am I supposed to say to that, Rahel?”

Rahel opened her elegantly glossed lips to reply, but before she could I felt a sudden hard surge of power up on the aetheric, and a male voice from behind me said, “I can solve all of your problems. Give David to me.”

Ashan. Tall, broad-shouldered, a sharp face that tended toward the brutal even while it was elegantly sculpted. He was a study in grays… silvered hair, a gray suit, a teal-colored tie that matched his eyes. Rahel’s fashion sense was neon-bright; he was like moonlight to her sun. Cold and contained and rigid, and nothing of humanity about him at all, despite appearances.

Rahel threw back her chair in a shriek of metal on concrete and hissed at him, eyes flaring gold. Ashan just stared at her. He looked breathtakingly violent, one second from murder, even though all he did was stand there.

I was looking at the embodiment of the war Rahel had been talking about, and I was the chosen battleground.

“Still campaigning for your master?” he asked. Not directed at me; I didn’t matter to him at all. I was human, expendable meat. “Time’s up, Rahel. Are you staying with him? The old guard’s changing. You don’t want to be stupid about this. I’ve got a place for you at my side.”

She didn’t answer. Didn’t need to. Her defensive crouch was answer enough.

“It’s a small army you’ve put together,” Ashan said. “Small, and weak. You stink of humans, Rahel. Don’t you want to wash yourself clean of them? Them and all of the filth that we’ve wallowed in these thousands of years while Jonathan watched his plans rot and die?”

“I’m clean enough,” she said, “and I don’t answer to you.”

“Not yet,” he agreed, and turned those eerie eyes on me. “I don’t know why Jonathan hasn’t killed you, human, but if you get in my way, I won’t hesitate. You know that.”

I dug my fingernails into my palms and slowly nodded.

“Now be a good girl and go get the bottle for me,” he said. “I want David. Now.”